


What Harbour Shelters Peace

by musamihi



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Age of Sail, Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-13
Updated: 2012-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-21 00:54:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/591603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson is a surgeon in the Royal Navy, serving on a ship undertaking a diplomatic mission to British Malaya. He finds himself befriending the reluctant diplomat – a man by the name of Sherlock Holmes, whose brother is reputed to hold more than a minor position in the Admiralty.  Their encounter with the mysterious Governor of Malacca and his secretary place them in the middle of a region about to erupt in a very calculated war.  This is the first part of their adventures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Harbour Shelters Peace

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Sherlock Big Bang](http://sherlockbigbang.livejournal.com) at Livejournal, and accompanied by [this fantastic piece of art](http://johnwatson.livejournal.com/8121.html) (NSFW) (which says more than my inner Patrick O'Brian would allow me to do) by [Sherlock_Holmes](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sherlock_holmes). In the grand tradition of the best naval fiction, I am playing fast and loose with dates and time in general; despite all evidence to the contrary, the year is 1808. My knowledge of all things nautical has been acquired purely through osmosis, and so is at best shabby. I apologize to anyone who knows better.
> 
>  **Warnings** for implied homophobia, hateful language, minor violence, and imperialism.

The air in the sick-berth was close and cold, heavy with the damp of the storm that churned above. The carpenter had been through just that morning to stop a dripping seam – a long and losing battle, for the _Galatea_ was not and never would be at this stage in her life a dry ship. But the acrid reek of tar he'd left behind him served at least to mask the smell of fresh vomit, and John was grateful.

Hopkins, his only inmate, swung stiffly in his hammock with one hand pressed over his eyes. His broken leg was doing very poorly; John suspected the sick in the bucket at his left had less to do with the endless swell and crash of the agitated sea than with the ominous red ballooning of his calf. The poor, clumsy sod had contrived to put himself right in the path of a wild gun (in itself a disaster, an awful, sloppy breach, an omen that made some of the more superstitious hands turn their grave faces to the angry sky and purse their lips knowingly) and three days of bleeding him and shuffling through the other available remedies had done nothing. The leg would probably have to come off.

John had never put quite as much stock in signs as some of his fellow seamen, but all the same his spirits were lower than they should have been only three days out of London. This was generally his quietest period – after the rush and logistical chaos that inevitably came at the beginning of a voyage had passed, he was accustomed to having a couple of weeks to portion out and organise his medicine chest, to see to a few incidental injuries and hypochondriacs before the pox began to make itself known to the men who'd fallen afoul of it on leave. Facing a potentially dangerous amputation before they'd even cleared Brest was unusual, unsettling. It was no wonder, he thought, that he should feel a little apprehensive.

And it was a much more attractive explanation for his gloomy disposition than the alternative.

"Edward," he said, drawing a muffled acknowledgement from the skinny, greasy boy currently polishing his equipment. "I'm seeing to Mr Holmes in his cabin." He stood, pouring the last of the cold, weak tea into a cup and bracing the pot up on his desk with a couple of books to keep it from pitching onto the floor during a bad roll. "If Hopkins comes up for air, come fetch me."

"Sir." Edward gave a curt nod and dove back into scratching old blood off a saw. He wasn't the most formal of servants, but he'd proven himself moderately more competent than the _Galatea_ 's surgeon's mate, and that was worth some rough manners.

John set out into the dim, cramped corridor, saucer clapped over the top of the teacup to preserve as much of its contents as possible. He had about as much chance of getting Mr Holmes to drink it as he had of swimming to the Cape, but it would have been a dereliction not to try.

He rapped at the door, bracing himself against the jamb as the ship began another slow heave down into one of the infinite trenches carved out of the sea by the relentless storm. The only response was a groan, a deep, miserable sound that could just as easily have come from the bulkhead at his side as from the man within.

"Mr Holmes."

Still no answer – but he never let that deter him with his other patients, and if this one thought he was any different, he'd find himself surprised. John wedged the door open with his shoulder, sat promptly on the small, water-stained chair that had been shoved into one corner of the cabin, and held the teacup out to the pile of coats swinging in the hammock. The smell of tar was somewhat less here, giving more prominence to the sick bucket standing beside Holmes' overlarge sea chest. "You'll be wanting to drink this," he said patiently. This would undoubtedly be a longer consultation than he'd normally have to allocate for seasickness.

The coats shifted; a fine, pale hand emerged to give him a viciously dismissive wave. "Go away."

"If you don't drink, you could easily die before we clear the Bay. That would be a first, one for the log – I've never seen anyone drop before we hit the trades, at least." He hadn't learned much about Holmes – the man was as prickly a one as he'd ever met, and hadn't invited conversation even before he'd been reduced to passing his days in a haze of nausea – but the one thing John had noticed right away was his raw and brittle pride.

Well. That wasn't quite true. He'd also noticed, struggle though he had to rub the impression from his mind before it could set in, that Holmes had a strange and sharp and beautiful face; that the pristine cloth of his jacket followed his waist in a line recalling the perfect slope of a clean keel; that his legs seemed to slip up the height of him in perfect form. It was hardly the first time he'd noticed such things about a man, and all he could do was work to make himself forget, which was, thankfully, much easier when the object of his attention was buried stubbornly under his winter layers.

Holmes reared up out of his heap of wool and glared. His dark hair was curling wildly in every direction, sticking to the sides of his face. The lamplight gave him a sickly pallor; he was transparently pale and faintly green. It was easier to meet his gaze this way, when illness had rendered him decidedly unappealing, but there was always something in his eyes that made John feel as though he ought to check that he still had his shirt on.

"And then we'd have to write your brother," John said, soldiering on even in the face of that feverishly scathing stare, "and tell him we'd lost you before you even had a chance to start thinking about your mission. I doubt he'd like that very much."

It was, apparently, the wrong thing to say; Holmes' eyes narrowed and the side of his face twitched up into a hateful sneer, his lips pressed together as though holding back a toxic deluge. "In that case," he spat, falling back into the bundle of shirts he was using for a pillow, "keep your bloody tea. And when you write him, tell him for me he's a fat f---ing bugger and I hope he chokes on his _croissant_."

John was a silent a moment, letting the creak and roar of the ship and storm fill in the space around them. He set the tea on the chest, where it clinked gently every few seconds, the saucer sliding infinitesimally back and forth. That was the most heat John had seen Holmes emit since he'd met him, since he'd watched him hauled aboard and presented to the captain, a diplomatic passenger (always an awkward cargo) bound for Malacca in the service of Ambassador Holmes, his elder brother and the king's long-time adviser on the complexities of Malaya and its Dutch troubles. John remembered thinking he'd seemed rather tactless for a diplomat, stiff and cold and a touch snappish, sullen and unhappy. He hadn't said a friendly word to anyone, as far as John could tell, and that icy, silent arrogance combined with the lavishly expensive provisions he'd brought with him had set almost everyone against him from the beginning. The wardroom, which was at least to have the benefit of the superb Haut-Brion that had been laid in with him, might have been expected to give him the benefit of the doubt – but then, who could love a man who wouldn't even mess with his fellows? Holmes hadn't once left his cabin, and that had tainted his material generosity with unforgivable condescension.

None of it added up. Holmes was working for his brother, but clearly had no desire to do so; he was unsuited even for cordial conversation, but was being sent far from home to see to delicate political matters; he was miserable and out of place, and yet he'd come aboard without objection.

It was, John thought, perhaps another case of the poor, desperate landsman who hoped the sea could cure what ailed him. He pitied all of them – they accounted for half the foremast hands, running from debts or crimes or wronged women, fleeing the country as though there were hope for anything better in the Royal Navy. Why shouldn't diplomats – or whatever Holmes was actually meant to be – suffer the same symptoms?

"You know," he said, changing tack, letting some slack into the line, "the service isn't a bad place to run to, not for a man like you –"

Holmes groaned again.

"And whatever it is you've left behind –"

"Stop, Doctor," Holmes cut in, twisting laboriously in his hammock to face him. His hard blue eyes were shaded with contempt. "Please. Before you embarrass yourself."

John drew back in his chair. He ought to have seen that coming; all the same, the rebuke stung a little. "If you'd rather not talk about –"

"About what I'm running from? I could ask you the same thing, Doctor. You haven't spent a month on land since you joined up, I can see it in your fingernails – it's not a wholesome diet they offer once the fruit runs out, is it? – and in your fingers, as a matter of fact. You've been in the service for at least eighteen years, otherwise you couldn't wear that Camperdown medal you were sporting the day we put out, but you haven't got nearly enough in the way of calluses to ever have worked a rope, really. Most surgeons do, you know – that is, they don't start out as surgeons, but slave away at something else for a few years before deciding, well, this is for the dogs, and going back to London to chase that warrant that will let them keep charge of the medicine chest. They come to the profession with palms like leather, but not you. No, you started right in as a medical man. Educated quite young, then, going by your age and likely date of enlistment – so, a reasonably intelligent gentleman, despite all evidence to the contrary. You could have stayed in London or, better yet, the country, set up your own practice, made a fair lot better than what they pay you here and found yourself with more interesting cases than wave after wave of pox, scurvy and the odd hacking off of an arm. What sort of man diverts a promising career toward that stinking, dead-end cockpit of yours? A man who has worse than nothing to lose on land. So, Doctor – what are you running from?"

A slow stretch of thunder sounded across the ship, through the cabin. John was stricken silent. The air was charged, dangerous with the shadows that buzzed in the back of his mind, threatening to take shape. Lightning could strike here. 

"Very well," Holmes said, smug and sharp. "Don't tell me. There's no need. It's not every doctor, after all, who'd be so very generous with his time."

John stood, rattling the chair against the bulkhead. "Drink, Mr Holmes," he said, his voice tight. He'd turned his face to stone, but the muscles in his back were coiling like snakes. "I'll be back at eight bells to check in on you. You know what to do if you should need me."

He jerked the door open and hurried out into the corridor. Holmes' voice followed him past a pack of mismatched midshipmen trudging off to lessons.

"And if you see Mr Brown, tell him I know he's been into my marzipan. It's starting to stain the insides of his pockets."

Mr Brown was, in fact, enjoying a bottle of Holmes' wine when John rushed at last into the wardroom, having spent three unhappy hours repolishing his equipment, reportioning drugs and harassing his unfortunate patients with multiple unnecessary inspections – anything to keep his hands and his mind occupied. Dinner he was not especially looking forward to; while he'd served on ships where meals could indeed serve as easy, light-hearted distractions, or even – rarest of the rare - sites of interesting conversation, the _Galatea_ wasn't one of them. It might improve as time wore on, of course, but he had his doubts – foremost among them Mr Brown.

"I can't abide a fellow who believes himself exempt from the company of his lowly fellow man simply because he's thrown them a few bottles of wine. It matters not to me if he has spent three hundred pounds on a cellar full of Haut-Brion – three hundred!" said Brown, who, as the purser, was more than usually attuned to the worth of any given object. He was seated behind an empty plate and a full glass, his rather slight frame given a sprawling appearance by the way his elbows seemed to jut out to his sides with every word he spoke. "Just as no man may buy his way into heaven, so he cannot bribe his way out of the society of his peers. What high and mighty bastards these politicos are, to be sure. If he means to snub everyone all the way to Malacca, he'll have a long bloody trip of it."

"He's genuinely indisposed," John said. Holmes had shaken him, and rudely, but sitting by while Brown maligned a man who couldn't possibly have stumbled his way to the table was out of the question. "Once we clear Brittany, and all this chop, I expect he'll be a little more social." Or would, at least, have someone else to abuse. The thought of him turning that frightening perception on Brown was almost enough to give John hope for the rest of the voyage.

Brown waved contemptuously with his glass. "For all the good it will do. This'll be a sorry journey, and just see if I'm wrong. Between our deadweight ambassador, this ominous weather and Lieutenant Rosen –"

Here the chaplain murmured a few words about charity and love of one's neighbour, which Brown dismissed with a harrumph. "No sir, I won't stand down for him. He presumes, entirely too much – before we even put out, he showed his true colours, insisting on the most ridiculous nonsense for nothing more than the joy of having his own way. Do you know, he talked the captain into a pair of perfectly superfluous guns against my express wishes, demanded we stock as much extra yardage as he pleased despite my scrupulous calculations – why, he even convinced you, Doctor, not to turn away that useless asthmatic, Samuels, when you had expressly told him –"

"That useless asthmatic can read and write, at least," John cut in, but it was no use; Brown was off again, decrying the expense of keeping whatever amount of powder he found objectionable, heaping scorn upon anyone who really thought that these newfangled bins would keep the lime juice from going off as quickly, expounding upon the myriad disadvantages of carrying passengers. John let it all wash around him, turning his attention as best he could to nicely browned section of chicken on his plate. His appetite was off, though – perhaps it was the weather, perhaps the smell that still clung to him from his encounter with Holmes or his hours in the sick berth, perhaps Brown's miserable company. 

More likely, though – no, certainly – it was the memory, the dread-laden memory that Holmes had kicked up like black silt in clear water, expanding in him, blinding him. He'd let it settle, seen it slowly, slowly buried over nearly twenty years, always so careful never to disturb it, and now it threatened to spring up, to sound again, to fill his mind with those familiar resonations that had once made his life a huge, soaring stretch of noise, a ringing infinite of possibility. He remembered – the secret midnight meetings in the park, the stupid, childish pacts they'd made, drunk on stolen whiskey, the day they went to sea, the notes they'd written one another, the nights they'd spent dreaming of one another, so close and yet so very, very far, unable to touch in the feverish, milling ant-hill of the ship, and then those nights, perfect bliss in the frigid fifties, all the better for knowing that any moment they might be caught out, ruined. The danger had gone to his head like wine, and he'd sped into those arms again and again, as often as he could – 

Holmes had been wrong about one thing, at least. John hadn't been running from anything, and he never had. He'd run toward Sebastian, recklessly, ecstatically, and his entire life had been spent in teaching himself to slow down, reining himself back, forcing himself to stand. At the end of that joyful sprint there had only been death – Sebastian lost, not hung from the yardarm for sodomy, not beaten to death for his sins, but simply caught by the cold, consuming sea, thrust overboard by unfeeling chance into the teeth of a black storm. He'd lasted two months, John's perfect, brave marine.

***

With the slow sweetening of the wind everything seemed to mellow, as it often did. Fair weather and a smooth run southward often had an amnesiac effect, John had noticed over his years of accumulated voyages, and it was a relief to him; it wasn't so much the leaving of England behind (although that no doubt cheered many of his shipmates) as the fact of moving. He had noticed that he was a man with a dangerous capacity for wallowing, and knew all too well the depths that awaited him if he chose to allow himself to sink into them. Two decades had taught him how to rein in his moods, a discipline well-supplemented by the naval regimen, and there was some genuine pleasure in the first burst of sun and warm wind, the rush into the Atlantic, the jutting coast of Africa far, far off the lee.

Everyone seemed to benefit from it as he did, except those determined to be unhappy. Even Holmes had perked up by the time they were skirting the Canaries, having grown sufficiently accustomed to the motion of the ship to walk about quite like a human being. He still had a queer aspect to him, insisting as he did upon a large, uncocked cavalier hat that, while shading his admittedly very pale face from the increasingly equatorial sun, made him look rather like a clergyman – an impression not lessened by his unseasonable black frock coat. But as dour as he appeared, he now had an occasional smile to hand out. He had even consented to have his violin taken out of its safe case and to play it once or twice for the interested officers and men, which he did well, and which seemed to make his inevitable little outbursts of choler less frequent. And while Holmes had made him uneasy at times – by his glances, his cold and appraising stare, even comments John had to tell himself over and over were empty of any significance not attached to them by his imagination – there was no more talk between them about John's ghosts. And John kept his eyes firmly to himself, for his part, indulging in a study of the turn of his leg or the sharp tug of his grin, all the more brilliant for its unexpected arrival, only when Holmes wasn't watching, only when he was at his music or settled into a book. And so they sailed on, rocking into equilibrium, and if he felt something overly warm or untoward at the fact that Holmes seemed to have chosen _him_ as his particular friend on board, he kept it well buried.

Some of the other officers had warmed to Holmes as well, although mostly superficially. Mr Brown was any man's friend once they were at table together and drinking wine he hadn't been obliged to pay for, and so his objections to Holmes soon evaporated (although they reasserted themselves on occasion when Holmes took it upon himself to guess what Brown had had for breakfast). The chaplain could not approve of Mr Holmes' very nearly audible muttering during church, but otherwise had to admit that his taste in music was admirably Christian. He made intelligent, if overly sharp, conversation, and that had often been lacking in the wardroom, and so most of its denizens considered him a decent addition when he wasn't attacking them personally. As for the rest, the Captain paid him very little attention beyond that required, Lieutenant Rosen treated him with the same gruff, absent ill-temper he seemed to have adopted toward everyone, and the remaining mass of the crew thought that he looked d-----d funny, but agreed that anyone who had publicly told the purser he ate too many eggs couldn't be all bad.

It wasn't until one Sunday, the end of a week spent making agonisingly slow headway past the Gulf of Guinea, that the ship's opinion regarding Holmes was decided – or rather, polarised. The grate had been rigged for the few minor offenses that had cropped up since the last Sunday; the sun beat down on a deck full of subtly shifting feet, men eager to do anything other than stand up straight in the heat. Even Holmes had shed his coat. Tedium and humidity had made everyone at least mildly disagreeable, but quietly so – no one had the energy to lash out against his fellow man.

No one except poor Allen, anyhow, and even he was only protesting vocally. 

"I never done it!" Allen was barking, not for the first time, with a stubborn chop of his forearm that seemed to be the most articulate defence he could muster. His messmates were standing red- and shamefaced, shuffling gently against the deck in unprecedented embarrassment. On the _Galatea_ , the done thing was to go quietly and not make a fuss about a little flogging, and Allen was doing no one any credit by showing himself a coward. Even the captain looked rather more stymied than angry. "You know g-------d well I take what's coming to me when it's right, you know g------d well the rope don't scare me, but I never done it!" Allen swore again, and the chaplain coughed into his sleeve.

"What's he never done?" Holmes asked, turning to John and neglecting to so much as lower his voice. John cleared his throat and swayed pointedly into him. The scene was chaotic enough without someone _else_ deciding to speak out of turn.

"I _said_ , what's he –" Here John stepped on his foot, and Holmes let a sharp sigh out of his nose, tipping his chin up and squinting against the sun. For a moment he was silent, but then, tightening his mouth in apparent resolve, he continued – in a tone only moderately softer than before. "You know, this naval discipline of yours makes no sense at all – you'll beat a man who outright denies any wrongdoing, but creatures like Wilson –" He nodded toward one of the more middling midshipmen, who looked perfectly stupefied with boredom watching the spectacle unfold – "Creatures like Wilson are allowed to pilfer tobacco and cocoa and all manner of things and no one says a single –"

"Will you – what?" John halted in the middle of telling him to _be quiet, for God's sake_.

"I'd have thought brazen theft enough to warrant punishment, that's all. But you will run your ships by your precious rules, won't you? It's perfectly –"

" _Wilson?_ "

Holmes gave him a queer look, furrowing his brow with just a hint of a smile. "Wilson what?"

"Wilson's been in the Master's tobacco?" John said, and felt a jolt in his stomach when he realised he'd spoken it aloud – and that his voice had carried. 

Allen's head shot up. "You see!" he cried, pointing with an emphatic stomp of his foot. "You see! The doctor knows it weren't me, he said so – you see!"

"That's what all this nonsense is about?" Holmes rocked back on his heels, looking rather too pleased with himself. "I thought everyone knew."

"You did not," John muttered, but the damage was done. Everyone's attention had been drawn; and if the Captain hadn't heard the accusation John had quite accidentally made, it would travel his way in little enough time. 

In the end, it was the Master himself who stepped forward, a blocky, imposing man with a neck like a mast. He stopped in front of John, his usual severity mixed with the discomfort inherent in this sort of highly unusual confrontation. "You accuse Mr. Wilson?" 

"I certainly do," Holmes piped up. The Master dealt him a withering look, which Holmes ignored. "Are you all quite serious? You hadn't noticed?"

Wilson, by this time, had realised something was afoot that concerned him very much indeed; but when he opened his mouth to object, one of the older boys shot an elbow into his ribs.

"You have evidence, I suppose," the Master blustered at him.

"Oh – are we requiring evidence, now? Well, if the state of his teeth isn't enough for you, I might draw your attention to his hands, to the sleeves of his jacket – not this one, of course. He wouldn't get up to it on Sundays, not with the absurd respect with which you imbue it even out in the middle of nowhere. It's perfectly obvious."

The Master scoffed. "The state of his teeth? Allen's teeth are hardly –"

"Allen's forty years older and has probably been at sea about that long. And God knows he hasn't had the same loving care and attention as Wilson, so clearly his mother's little darling. A few years in the service don't wash out coddling. Wilson's been kept scrubbed pink his entire young life, you can see it – even though he's sadly let himself go – in the way he treats every smudge like a dirty secret. And yet his teeth have taken a precipitous turn for the yellow, likely because he thinks the stuff's for chewing, the poor, wasteful idiot, and the calluses on his hands, what few there are, are practically golden. And you mean to tell me you seriously hadn't noticed?"

Wilson's face was beyond pink now, and the Master appeared to have faltered. "And – his jacket?" the Master stammered out, as though determined to pres shim to the end.

"You'll find it's absolutely glowing with flecks of that awful gilt covering the box you keep the stuff in. It comes off as easily as birch bark – I noticed it myself," Holmes concluded, "when I had a mind to roll myself a cigarette."

The Master went purple. 

But that was that; Wilson was sunk, and Allen vindicated. And from that point forward, no one on board the _Galatea_ could say they didn't mind much one way or another about Mr Holmes. Some of the crew revered him as a genius, as almost a holy man; some whispered that he was a wizard and unnatural and bad luck. Holmes didn't help to quiet the hubbub about his abilities, obliging as he did every single man who asked him to guess where he'd been born or what his father had done for a profession. His intelligence was on full display, and he seemed swimmingly happy with the admiration, even with the suspicion he excited. Even Lieutenant Rosen asked him to repeat his _little trick_ later that evening, seeming much more interested in Holmes than ever he had been before. But when Holmes was able to tell him precisely to whom he'd been writing a letter _and_ what sort of school he'd gone to, he seemed less pleased than annoyed.

It was several days later, on a foggy morning swinging around Tenerife, that John found reason to be glad Holmes had opened his mouth when he had. Up consulting with Mr Brown about the miserable condition of his supplies, John was watching a fairly routine repair operation – consulting with the purser usually went more smoothly when one had something else to watch while he rambled about how put-upon he was – and enjoying the chance to soak in the humid, grey damp rather than the humid, black damp of his cockpit. Lieutenant Rosen was overseeing the reinforcement of one of the yardarms, and the thing was proceeding drearily apace, men as gloomy as the weather going through the familiar and strenuous motions under the Lieutenant's glum direction. All was ordered, if not quiet – until Holmes came out on deck, still looking soft with sleep, for his usual morning stroll.

The change was not immediate, but over the next few moments, John began to register - _notice_ was too strong a word – a growing confusion. Rosen's orders stalled briefly, and then resumed; but the ensuing activity was not the regimented, if sullen, progress of a group of men through a procedure they knew as well as the backs of their hands. There was hesitation, a scuffling, a shout; nothing too out of the ordinary in the course of a morning.

But then the yardarm swung down dangerously, quick and heavy and uncontrolled – and there was a thundering of men from one side of the deck to the other, and a rough, confused cry to _look out_ , and a chaotic thumping crash. John whirled to watch, immediately seeking any men who might have been hit, any sign of red or of men stretched out that might indicate his morning was about to become much more full than it had begun. But to his relief all he saw was a knot of men struggling with the fallen beam, arguing among themselves – heatedly, indeed – about whether the Lieutenant had said _raise_ or _let fall_ , and even if he _had_ said _let fall_ , you stupid bugger, he meant _raise_ , because that made no f---ing sense –

And after perhaps thirty seconds of all of this, John realised that the reason it wasn't stopping was that Lieutenant Rosen wasn't stopping it. For a moment John couldn't find him in the mess of people, but then he caught sight of him again, his hat tipped askew and his face white. He stormed toward his team from the larboard railing, shouting rather more savagely than John thought the situation merited. Slowly, order returned. The men set back to their work against the unflagging wall of noise that was Rosen's voice and the tramping tread of a line of men steadily hauling the yardarm back into place. John turned back to the purser, about to comment on the brief excitement, when another shout went up – but this time, from only one man.

"Man overboard!'

Everyone whose hands weren't on the stabilizing rope dashed over to the side of the ship. John had to shove his way through the press and the shouts of _where_ and _who_ to lean over the rail and search with the rest of them The fog lay thick and low on the water, and only in the occasional swirling breaks in the mist brought on by the crest of a wave could he see the surface clearly. His heart dropped in his chest. Hopefully it was one of the few men who could swim, but even so, in this weather, a man could get turned around and never live to regret it. He remembered another storm as thought it had been only last night, dark and lashing with rain, the ship pitching under him so wildly he hardly knew which way was up, throwing him off his feet every time he tried to run to the side, his throat splitting with _man overboard, man overboard_ , and other men's hands sinking into his soaking coat to keep him from leaping into the water after the man he swore he could see against the black water, the face he swore had stared straight at him from the hopeless sea before sinking away forever.

"Holmes," one of the men spat.

There was a confused muttering, an argument so quick John could hardly understand it, and then Allen was flying over the side. 

John leaned further over the side, his mouth dry. He could see nothing in the white, but he could hear shouting and splashing – Allen swimming and calling for the poor, lost landsman. Then silence, and then, finally: "A line! A line!"

John seized a rope and threw, surrounded at once by the very curious sound of about half of the ship throwing up a cheer.

Soon Holmes was back on deck, on his knees and hacking up water, his skin deadly pale and his hair plastered black against his face. He fell down upon his hands, tilting strangely to the side, and John rushed forward, sinking down beside him. There was red pooling into the growing puddle where Holmes' head bent down to the deck. "God," John muttered. "He must have struck it on –"

"I have him, Doctor," Allen said, and, without even waiting to be asked, he hauled Holmes up in his arms (more roughly in his enthusiasm than John would have liked, given Holmes' condition), and started off toward the cockpit. "Don't worry yourself about that."

***

"You've got luck, and plenty of it," John said, pressing the cloth as firmly against Holmes' tender skull as he dared, waiting for the man to raise his own hand to hold it in place. Holmes' cabin was suffering from the same unhealthy closeness as was every other space below decks, the warm, pressing wetness of these latitudes, but John had decided he'd rest better here. And it was rest that he needed, thank God, nothing much more serious than that. If the yardarm truly had been what had hit him in the back of the head, he was lucky to be here at all. "It could have taken your head clean off, or at least left a sizeable dent. A headache's hardly –"

"Thank you, Doctor," Holmes replied, with a shade of his old snappishness that John was no longer accustomed to hearing. His eyes were shut against the pain, his elbow steady on the little table that held his books and papers to keep him from swinging too far back and forth in his hammock.

John slid his hand away, pulling it out of the salty, bloodied curls just as Holmes' fingers found the cloth; they both paused for a moment after the near miss, but John sat haltingly back into the chair. The touch of his hand or the furious heat of his neck was neither here nor there, at the moment, he had to tell himself. He had nearly been killed, and from the unusually white-lipped, clammed-up way Holmes was going about it, John knew there was more to this than met the eye, at least as far as _his_ eye was concerned. 

"What happened?" he asked, after a few moments of silence broken only by Holmes' studiously even breathing. The sight of his water-logged coat, his streaming hair like rotting kelp slapping against the deck was too powerful in John's mind for quiet to be tolerable for very long, too reminiscent of that other body that he'd never seen in death. "Did you –"

"An accident," Holmes said, less sharp this time than strained, and John peered cautiously down into his face expecting to find some nascent sign of a more urgent head injury – but there was nothing there but pallor and irritation and, curiously, reserve. He had never thought of Holmes before as someone who held back. "The yardarm, you saw it fall. I didn't see it coming." He tried on a self-deprecating smile, which fit him about as well as a midshipman's boots might have. "Even I can't perceive everything."

Acting might have been one of Holmes' weaker skills, but John and God and everyone else knew deduction wasn't, and he'd have wagered anything his friend was withholding something. But, either out of deference to his strategist's brain or because he was reluctant to press a wounded man into anything like an interrogation, John desisted. He simply nodded, watching that stooped, damp figure for signs of concussion. 

There were none. When Holmes finally raised his drawn, white face, the lantern gave him a sickly, greyish cast and the lank way his hair clung to his skull made him something like a monster of the deep out of the more superstitious hands' stories, but those eyes – those cool, depthless blue eyes struck out at John as from an age gone by, still and collected and knowing, if not particularly wise. They seemed to twist him up and hold him in thrall, and it was only after feeling the almost imperceptible swing of the ship grow so pronounced as to make him lightheaded that he realised he had stopped breathing. He shoved his hands down the lengths of his thighs, smoothing out his breeches, and forced himself to take in what little air the cabin afforded. He wanted nothing more than to be close to him, to feel him solid in his arms and drive out the impurities – salt and foam and cold and twenty years of sand and shell – that the ocean had wrought upon this man in front of him, but he could not, he never would be able –

Holmes' voice was strangely gentle when he spoke, his voice rising as though from a void. "I should like some tea, I think."

And so John fetched him tea, grateful for the relief from the fraying tension. Long minutes in the kitchen and the hot, clumsy walk back with a full tea-pot and two of the dwindling collection of intact teacups made for a welcome distraction. His mind felt aired out once again when he returned, and he saw only Sherlock Holmes, a friend sadly soaked and bruised, a man who presented no challenge more daunting than warming him up and giving him some tea and brandy for his pain.

"Tell me about your friend," Holmes said quietly, once he'd drunk half a cup and watched John settle back into his chair. "The one you went to sea with."

It would never not be unsettling how easily Holmes could read him. Not for the first time, John felt the dangerous potential of that power creeping up his spine. But he gave into it, accustomed by now to the thought that Holmes might know anything he'd never told him, even the most closely-guarded secrets, and that as spiteful and as petty as he might sometimes seem, to use those secrets for ill against a friend would have been entirely outside his nature.

"His name was Moran." John dragged it up out of himself like a shipwreck in a storm. The pieces were soft and old and falling apart, like bad wood. "We were – good friends."

"Almost from childhood."

John's mouth tightened and he lifted his head from his contemplation of his scuffed boots to fix Holmes with a glare that he didn't really feel. "Always so well informed."

Holmes shrugged. "No one informed me but you."

"We decided it was the only way," John pressed on, ignoring that. "We were from – nowhere. Outside Retford, which I suppose you already know. We didn't have any money. It was the only way." _It was the only way we could go off together._ Holmes' uncanny perceptive abilities were a relief, now, allowing John his silence when he so desperately wanted to keep it. He didn't have to look into the man's face to know he understood.

Silence; the clinking of china only. "And he died. Some time ago – some very long time ago," Holmes prompted.

"He was tall," John insisted instead, not finished with Sebastian's story, refusing to let it go so quickly. "Taller than you, even. And the best shot for miles around, not that that meant much to anyone but us. He was mad for boxing, and ruined his nose for it more than once. But he was even better with the sword. He'd wear himself out on it. There was no one it was worth his time to fight, certainly not me. I think," he continued, ignoring the inevitable death the way a man ignores the first unobtrusive drops of rain that signal a downpour, "it was the bayonet that drew him to the marines as much as anything. He liked his silver almost as well as he liked his blades."

"And then," Holmes persisted, gentle, but no less erosive for that, "he died."

 _And then he died._ Simple as that. "Not far off Port Desire." The words were flat and meaningless to him now, after all this time. "A storm. Not the sort of ending he'd be satisfied with." Sebastian hadn't been a romantic, exactly, but he'd always had a certain studied poise that would have been offended at the thought of being extinguished by anything as mundane as the weather.

Holmes nodded. It was the closest thing to an expression of sympathy John could imagine from him, and he took the ensuing quiet as commiseration. Even so, the room felt empty around him, in a way that he supposed nothing could ever fill, as much as saving Holmes from a similar grave had made him feel as though someday he might.

"We're closer to Malacca every day," John offered after some indeterminate period of time, when Sebastian had faded once again. "To your mission. You'll be glad to get that off your chest, I expect."

"Poor, innocent, Doctor Watson." Holmes kicked at the floor, shoving his hammock back into a deep swing that couldn't be good for his head injury. "As though anything Mycroft gives one can be got off one's chest."

"But surely once you've done what he asked –"

"He means for me to fail. Do I strike you as a diplomat?" Holmes scoffed without waiting for a reply (which was just as well, because he'd not have received a favourable one). "I only wish I'd paid more attention to his stupid business in recent years – then I might have had some better idea of what precisely he meant me to fail at. As it stands, all I can do is read his insufferable directives over and over again, looking for whatever meaning I can piece together. 'Sample the excellent fish,' what do you suppose that means? 'Do pause to admire the local fauna, which I am sure you will find astounding,' as though he'd ever had time for fauna that wasn't on a platter. 'On no account are you to underestimate Governor Moriarty,' as though I were some sort of dullard who'd never met an overfed, underbred provincial stuffed-shirt. 'Remember your king and country rely upon you.' No, if you knew Mycroft," he concluded, dry and dull and rolling his eyes back toward the bulkhead, "you would know he's only sent me here to vex me. I'm sorry to tell you, but you're not a ship's surgeon. You are serving on the corporeal whim of Mycroft Holmes."

***

The corporeal whim of Mycroft Holmes put in some months later at Réunion to take on water. The time had not passed entirely uneventfully, but there were no more near-death experiences on Holmes' part, and if someone had asked, John would not have been able to say his friend was the _most_ hopeless civilian he'd ever seen walk the length of a ship. Nor was he the most tactful; he had his share of tiffs with the men who shared his table, and put himself in the path of the wrong officers from time to time, and John eventually stopped intervening on his behalf, finding it at once imprudent to compromise his own position with the crew and desirable that Holmes should learn to toe a line once in a while. But there were no lasting grudges, no serious disagreements – aside from the hint of suspicion that existed between Holmes and Rosen, which John wasn't sure he'd have remarked at all had he not been looking for it, everything seemed about as it ought to after several months at sea.

Rosen led the party tramping out onto Réunion for supplies, and John, over the course of the two days leading up to the expedition, finally convinced Holmes – who seemed eager to go ashore – that it would be best to stay aboard. His friend objected more strenuously than he could understand, half insisting that he be among the landing party, but John held his position. A little breathing room sometimes worked wonders for men who'd simply been too close for too long; he wanted, if he could, to help Holmes understand how to survive the prolonged and uncomfortable proximity that came with an ocean journey. The truth was that he was quite proud of Holmes – while to an untrained observer he might have seemed distant and prickly, he'd made a great deal of progress since his first few weeks on board. John thought if he could only show him the finer points of how to cope with his fellow man, if he could share the knowledge _he'd_ gained over his decades on these close, floating worlds, Holmes might learn truly to enjoy his time at sea. The voyage home might be easier than this one had been; and perhaps … well, perhaps there would be another voyage. He didn't quite let himself think it, but he couldn't deny that the thought of losing his new companion made him – sad. He wanted to help him – he wanted to keep him.

And quite aside from all of that, John suspected Holmes might be the sort to have a habit of wondering off at inopportune moments. And so off went Rosen and about twenty other men, including the Captain, and Allen, and _that useless asthmatic_ Samuels, and John settled in for a bit of cleaning and a not altogether polite but nonetheless diverting game of whist with Holmes and a couple of the more sporting men.

When the sun was low in the sky on the third day, in danger of slipping completely behind the tall clouds gathered on the horizon, there was some concern about why the boats hadn't returned; when one boat came back with a grim and harried-looking crew, the entire ship sank into a strange, fretful quiet. None of the returning men said a thing, very likely under orders, and John found himself watching as Holmes grew more and more restless, less and less patient with everything around him. When at last a light floated out of the darkened harbour – the second boat and its lantern, rowing toward the _Galatea_ – Holmes was in danger of toppling into the sea again, so eagerly was he leaning out to watch it. John stood uneasily by, ready to seize his arm should he do something stupid.

But Holmes, in the end, only cursed and slapped his palms down violently on the railing. "I knew it! I should have gone. I hardly thought he'd be so bold, but that was foolish, wasn't it –"

"Who?" John leaned forward himself, trying to see what had set Holmes into such a froth. "Who are you –"

" _Look_ , Doctor. They're close enough, now – look. Who's missing?"

John shut his eyes a moment; they were burning from staring too hard at the small, approaching light, and the confirmation – for when Holmes implied something these days, he very often took it as fact – that the party had lost a man was a hard blow. When he opened them again, he could see the boat well enough to count the occupants, but not to identify them. There was indeed one man missing. "I don’t –"

"Samuels." 

John turned to stare at him. Holmes turned to stalk away and John followed, thinking it not a bad idea to remove themselves from the group collecting near the side. ""How can you possibly know that?" he asked, because it was better than asking the other question. _Where is he, then?_

"Because I've been speaking to him." Holmes scoffed at him. "You needn't have much of a brain at all to find things out, you know, if you only want to. No." He ducked below, heading for his cabin. "Ever since Lieutenant Rosen decided I was enough of a threat to make an attempt on my life in daylight among about fifty men, I've been very curious as to _why_. I could see no reason until I began to get to know Samuels – undergoing casual interviews with the entire bloody crew, by the way, was one of the more tedious investigative manoeuvres I've ever endured. They're a curious pair, those two."

"Rosen and Samuels? But –"

"No, I don't know _why_ , don't ask _why_." Holmes sat himself abruptly on his sea chest, and John followed him into the cramped little room, shutting its door and standing with his arms across his chest. "But Rosen has an interest in him and Samuels either can't explain it, or won't. Did you know," Holmes continued, "that Rosen insisted Samuels be taken aboard despite his health deficiencies?"

"Well – yes." 

Looking irritated – ether that John had held out an essential piece of information or that he'd possessed it before the reveal, John couldn't be sure – Holmes pushed on. "And perhaps you've also noticed how he goes watch for watch with him, how he barely lets him out of his sight, how Rosen watches his every move but –"

"Now, wait a moment," John leapt in. He had no affection for the lieutenant, but neither did he care for free accusations of – of what? "That could be true for almost any man here. There isn't much room, if you haven't noticed, to get out of another man's way. Of course they're constantly in one another's path – so are we all."

"No. Rosen is an ill-tempered c--- with a short fuse."

John could hardly disagree, but he failed to see the relevance; so he waited.

"And," Holmes said, stretching out his words as though he expected John to anticipate them, "he's never once turned his anger on Samuels – never shouted at him, never berated him, never brought his ill-tempered c----ing self to bear against him. Not once."

"I – hasn't he?" It couldn't be true – John couldn't have said he'd taken any note of it, of course.

"Oh, God. It's a wonder you lot manage to keep this thing afloat. Not _once_! He was very careful to bring Samuels here, he's been extremely careful – apparently to great effect – to establish that he bears no ill-will toward Samuels, indeed has no interest in him at all. And once he realises that there's a man on board who might actually _notice_ were he to commit a murder, he tries to commit a preventative one – creates a disturbance and shoves me overboard. What – is that a _coincidence,_ then?"

John felt a hot, angry flare surge in his chest. "So he did – he pushed you over. He tried to kill you. Why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you –"

"Because I wanted to see what he'd do, of course. It's been very disappointing; he's done nothing. Well, aside from acting terribly anxious, which – no, you haven't noticed that, either, have you?"

John was silent.

Holmes sighed. "And now – well. He was biding his time, wasn't he? Waiting to get out from under my nose to do the deed. And today you gave him his chance, you and your – you and your whist."

John sucked in a breath. "I beg your pardon?"

"If you hadn't been so –" Holmes stood, waving his arm dismissively, and began to pace (which more or less amounted to pivoting back and forth in this tiny cabin). "If you had let me go, Doctor, as I wanted to, Samuels wouldn't be lying in a ditch, as he most likely is, on that bloody island."

"You –" John could hardly believe the accusation; it was petty and it was cruel, even coming from Holmes. Worst of all, it bit deeply because John knew in his heart he'd kept Holmes back for selfish reasons. He'd had no way of knowing, had no responsibility to poor Samuels, wherever he was, but he couldn't tell himself that he was entirely without blame when it came to holding Holmes back – to holding him close. There was always something inherently greedy in wanting someone. The world had taught him that when he was much younger, when it had snatched away his best love – when it had punished him for the hubris of thinking he could have what he most desired. He'd learned then – he'd thought – not to clutch things too closely. "I had nothing to do with it." The words came out harsh and loud and not at all confident.

"Oh, don't, Doctor." Holmes sneered, his face twisting up into the grotesque parody of distaste it always did when he was being cruel for the same of being cruel. John should have known then not to take him seriously, but he felt – defeated, suddenly. "You don't think," Holmes said, "that I don't know – that I don't see you coddling me like I'm some sort of dog you want to train to you? You don't think I can tell, when you so _generously_ take it upon yourself to tell me how I ought to act, what I ought to say, how I ought to treat everyone? As though I don't know – as though I can't decide for myself what suits me. You're painfully transparent. You want to keep me, do you? Think you've found yourself a nice little _mate_ to follow you around the world? You imagine that if you just push me into shape, I'll submit myself to this ridiculous ship for a second more than I absolutely must?"

John's throat was still, his mouth snapped shut; he was staring, dead blank, at a spot just over Holmes' shoulder. Of course it was all true, but - he couldn't see the crime in any of it. He felt as though the deck had disappeared beneath him. Everything he'd thought to suggest, to say to Holmes in all friendship, to offer him in good faith, was being thrown back at him as though it were ammunition. From what he could tell, he was being accused – violently accused – of attempting to have a friend. And he was more wounded than he could bear to be in another man's presence. He had to leave –

Holmes leaned closer to him, his voice still deep and brutal. "You think you'll make me into your long-lost marine – any idiot can see it. But I'm ever so sorry, Doctor; if you stop to look for once in your life, you'll find I'm not very like some rustic, boxing brute from –"

"No." John looked at him then; their eyes met, and something fell like a rotted branch, like a swinging yardarm, like an impenetrable wall of black, lashing rain between them. "No, you're not a fucking thing like him."

And he turned and marched back on deck, leaving Holmes alone in his cabin; and he said not another word to him, not until they reached Malacca, not even then. And even if it was with some pain that he saw his friend climb off the _Galatea_ and drop into the boat the Governor's party had sent him, even if he regretted the frigid distance stretching between them, he made no move to close it. He might have been as much of a fool as Holmes thought him, but he learned his lessons when they were given. He read signs when they were flashed in front of his face. Don't cling too close; don't love too well; take no joy.

The _Galatea_ floated in the harbour, awaiting the pleasure of its diplomatic passenger, and John floated with it, and could think of only once before in his life when he had ever felt so alone.

***

The sticky heat and unforgiving sun made the grandeur of the Governor's residence seem dingy and vaguely sinister, as though opening any of its doors might produce the same effect as turning over a rock. It wasn't like Sherlock to have these sorts of ridiculous flights of fancy, but he was agitated – had been agitated for weeks, now, and wanted nothing more than to get back to his chilly little rooms in London and forget he had ever set foot on that ship. His wounded pride (and wounded something else, something he didn’t like to name) rankled worse than sea-sickness ever had. It would almost be worth it just to give Mycroft what he wanted – undoubtedly for Sherlock to make a fool of himself and place England in an awkward position that Mycroft could then exploit to his heart's content – if it meant being able to go home more quickly.

Unfortunately, dinner seemed destined to drag on for ages. He was subjected to awful conversation and worse food, all of which felt too rich after months of Watson's simple banter and the _Galatea_ 's cooking. The colours here were too bright, the smells too strong, the air too heavy and deafening. Worse, no one had yet brought up the threat of Dutch invasion, which he knew to be the topic on which he was supposed to be engaging the Governor, which he imagined meant he was to be subjected to a private meeting later on (as though it wasn't late enough already!) rather than being allowed back to his hammock on board. The Governor had, in fact, remained largely silent throughout the meal, making a simpering sort of toast to his _distinguished guest_ when the wine had first been poured, but otherwise deferring to his deputies, who asked only polite questions and spoke more about what they missed in London than about anything bearing on Sherlock's current business. 

He'd distracted himself by sizing up the Governor, now looking sleepy and content in the dying gold of the sunset, propped at the head of the long, dark table scattered with napkins and shedding flowers and emptying dishes. He was a slight man, soft-spoken and meek in his gestures, likely of Irish parents but almost certainly born in some godforsaken colony like this one. He was a widower, clear from his ring and its position and from the overall ill-kept look he had about him. His fingers showed unmistakable signs of enthusiastic attention to some fretted instrument, and the way he shaped the inside of his left hand (for he was left-handed) meant it was probably bowed – a viol or an arpeggione, Sherlock couldn't be sure. The one impression that simply radiated off of him was apathy. In a more intelligent man Sherlock might have called it boredom, and sympathised most heartily, but in this soft, slow, unimpressive figure he thought it more likely to be dull contentment, an inability to imagine anything better than the stultifying luxury and stagnation in which he had always existed.

When the merchant who had been chattering at Sherlock's elbow for the better part of an hour went to find more friendly company, leaving Sherlock alone with the Governor, the man finally leaned in toward him, smiling in that maddeningly inoffensive way most of Mycroft's political connections had. "Well," he said, resting his fingers lightly on the stem of his untouched glass of wine. "Aren't you going to ask me?"

 _Oh, God._ Sherlock could hardly suppress a sneer. Not only was he being forced to endure one of the most tedious meals of his life, he was also expected to make the opening salvo of whatever stupid deal Mycroft had thought to orchestrate. "I had rather hoped you'd ask me," he said blandly, trying, to his credit, to act as though he cared at least a little.

The Governor blinked at him, his face settling for a moment into something oddly blank and incongruous – but before Sherlock had time to interpret it, the impression had fled. "No, no," the Governor laughed, his teeth catching clumsily on his lower lip for a fraction of a second. "I meant – aren't you going to ask me, is it the viol, or is it the arpeggione?"

Sherlock stared. The Governor's smile tightened, sharpened, and the corners of his eyes lifted in a mirth Sherlock would never have credited him with two minutes ago. 

"Your brother had this little trick he liked to do, you see," the Governor continued, his voice low and suddenly impossibly playful. Sherlock resisted the urge to look round and see if anyone else was in earshot. "Where he would show off by telling you things about yourself. Does it run in the family? I thought it might."

"Did he ask you that?" Sherlock asked dismissively, determined to seem aloof even as a bright excitement was starting in his chest. It was tempered by wariness, but it was the first real flash of hope he'd had in months that something interesting might happen. Something worthwhile.

The Governor grinned, now. "Would you like to know what I told him?"

"No." Sherlock filled his mouth with a spoonful of cloying rice pudding, the better to express his utter lack of interest. "He shouldn't have asked. It's obviously the viol."

Moriarty laughed. "Pretty little guess."

"It's not a guess." Well, not anymore.

"Oh, you're very like your brother."

"I am nothing like my brother."

Sherlock felt his face heating, as he realised – half a moment too late – that Moriarty had probably meant to goad him, and that he'd given him precisely what he wanted. He drew himself up straighter, set his spoon down, and made himself stiffen inside. Very well – that would be the last time Moriarty would score off of him so easily. He'd put his guard up, even if it was as rusty as an unused gate after such a very long period of disuse.

"I would prefer that, I admit," Moriarty was saying, drawling as the company became drunker, louder, less organised around them, like shadows on a wall cast by two candles – insubstantial, insignificant, wild. Sherlock wished they would just leave. "Your brother does meddle."

Sighing, Sherlock relished the opportunity to let a little disappointment slip into his voice. "Oh – are we going to talk about politics, now?"

Moriarty smiled tightly, but Sherlock could tell he'd won a point. It thrilled him to see that this man was as eager to impress him as Sherlock was to learn about him. Malacca seemed much larger all of a sudden, a wide expanse of possibility that lay between him and that ship he'd left behind, which might as well have been as far away as England.

"Come with me," was all Moriarty said, standing and resuming his pleased and stupid smile, the slight forward curl to his shoulders, as the nearer guests turned to look at the departing host. Sherlock followed him without a second thought, thrilling in every turn they took away from the dining room, the empty corridors opening up for him with a much-needed drop in temperature. The house was grand, and strange, and sounded like running water, but none of that touched his senses in the way the man before him did. Governor Moriarty was delightfully unstable, shifting postures and expressions and attitudes even as they walked, out of sight of everyone else. He called to mind those overwrought poetic depictions of the wind or of the sea, anything over which men had no power and which drove them to hyperbole. Sherlock had never seen anyone who could change so easily and so meaninglessly; most of Moriarty's affectations seemed not to have any purpose, since surely he couldn't expect to fool Sherlock into thinking he was fifteen different men. It made him feel as though he were foundering for a moment. If what he saw and read off of people could mean nothing, then what –

But that was neither here nor there. He kept up easily with Moriarty's pace, striding along with him and climbing a narrow stair to a large, airy study. 

"You’ve brought your violin, haven't you? I'll have it brought up; you'll play for me." Moriarty led him through the room and pushed through two glass doors onto a balcony, leaning against the railing. Sherlock followed him, and looked out over the roof, sloped in the Dutch fashion, for a not unpleasant view of the river where it fed out into the Strait. "I ought to get something out of it, after all, if your brother's so intent that you should come in and infuriate my deputy and the local commanders. I suppose you know why?"

"I don't care in the slightest." It was true. Sherlock hadn't bothered to think of what Mycroft wanted, or what it might mean for anyone. He couldn't think of anything more boring or pointless than trying to thwart Mycroft at some game of international affairs, for which he cared even less, if such a thing were possible, than domestic politics. 

Moriarty took his arm with an easy air of confidence. "No, naturally. But what he _wants_ is for you to get everyone beating the drums about how England slights us, gives us insufficient protection, leaves us sitting open for a Dutch invasion. There's nothing they enjoy complaining about more, here. And I think he'd very much like it if it produced, in fact, a Dutch invasion – that's what I think."

"How nice," Sherlock replied, fixing him with a sidelong, disapproving gaze. The Dutch could invade now, for all he cared.

"I'd prefer he didn’t, that's all." Moriarty sounded almost teasing. "I like it here. I feel I'm not quite finished."

"Well, I can't imagine what you want me to do about it."

"I don't need you to do anything." He leaned his elbows on the balcony's railing without letting go of Sherlock's arm, tugging him gently down with him. "I could give it to them myself if I wanted – tomorrow. That'd blow things all to hell back home, wouldn't it? But I can't bring myself to give a d--- whether those grey men fall dead of apoplexy or not. It doesn't matter to me whether they get their way, here or anywhere else. I just don't care." There was an edge of frustration in his voice that Sherlock found fascinating, and he liked to think he understood it – that he was the only one who understood it. That he, like Moriarty, was simply driven to distraction by the way people seemed to think they _mattered_ when everything they did was just another rote stupidity, no different than the day before or the day after.

Or perhaps Moriarty was lying. Perhaps he did care. Perhaps he was using his talents to manipulate Sherlock into some politically beneficial course of action. He doubted it, and would have found it disappointing, but couldn't bring himself to mind too terribly much either way. How refreshing, to find someone else who knew that it was all just a game the rules to which no one had bothered to write up.

"And what will you do when you finish?" Sherlock asked. What he meant to finish seemed an irrelevant and shallow question.

For a long while Moriarty was silent. The sun on the city was nearly gone; the water had ceased to flash toward the sky and faint lights appeared in the streets, in the more fashionable windows. It was still bloody hot, but there was something freeing about the growing dark. Sherlock felt as though he could expand into it without stopping.

"Who knows," Moriarty said, at last. "Go someplace else." _What_ , his entire affect seemed to shout, _is the point, anyway?_ But as Sherlock leaned beside him, as they stood arm in arm, something in the blood seemed to flow with a new energy, and it was hard to feel that anything was quite as empty as the greying, cloudless vault of sky over Malacca appeared. As the darkness thickened, throwing into bright relief the fires and lamps that dotted the city below them, Sherlock absorbed the almost startlingly peaceful clatter all around him: horses and coaches below, servants moving through the rooms of the house, the wind and the spotty gusts of bells and flapping cloth brought in from the distant water. He felt so very oddly tranquil – as though he belonged here – and try as he might, he could not remember the last time he'd stood in someone else's company for so long without feeling as though he ought to say something. 

Sherlock turned his head as a lamp flared up in the glass behind him. There was light spreading through the rooms now, warm and inviting, and beside the great desk he saw the slightly distorted hourglass shape of the viol. Without a word he went back inside, positioned himself in Moriarty's chair, and drew the instrument between his knees as though it had been his own, and began to put it in tune – no small feat in this humidity. As he listened to the slow, scraping, levelling sounds – pitching up and then down and creaking as slowly and as predictably as the deck of a ship – his eyes wandered the tidy, dustless study. When he finally pushed off into a bit of slow, contemplative Telemann, his gaze settled on the room's only other interesting item, a portrait of a woman in a gauzy, rose-colored dress seated cheerfully on a récamier. It was no technical masterpiece, but its position and the great expense of the frame suggested particular esteem. 

"That was the first lady, I suppose," he said, as the bow lulled over the G string. 

"Yes, she was." Moriarty stepped inside, pushing the doors gently shut behind him. He leaned back against the iron handles, his eyes dark and amused as they passed over the tableau – the man, the viol, the portrait – that Sherlock knew must have been quite intimately familiar to him. "That was made – nearly seven years ago, I believe."

"And what was she like, your wife?" Sherlock wondered who Moriarty had been to her, really. Surely he'd always been more than one man. Had she been married the governor? To the stupid, slothful provincial official? To the soft, social shell wrapped around this curious genius?

But Moriarty answered easily, without hesitation – fondly. "Silly. Frivolous. Damned expensive. Sharp as a knife and about as hard. I liked her very much," he continued, coming forward to rest against the edge of the desk. "More than I've ever liked anyone, I think."

"She was young. What – the climate disagreed with her?" In these latitudes, under the management of men who were hardly London's best and brightest, disease did tend to make its mark. How long ago had she died? Moriarty had moved his ring long enough ago that no stripe remained on his left hand. No doubt Mycroft had left him some sort of biographical profile – he'd have to go back and read it.

Moriarty smiled; there was a certain ferocity to it. "She drowned. A sad accident, as everyone here would tell you – although of course none of them were very sad. She was too unconcerned with others to be well-liked."

"A sad accident." Something in the way he'd said it –

"Everyone would tell you." 

"Everyone lies." Sherlock found himself regretting he hadn't met Moriarty sooner, hadn't been able to get a taste of this little mystery for himself. "One would think a man who'd suffered such a grievous loss might want to leave the scene of his sorrow – to go home."

"One might." Moriarty's toe was tapping gently to the plodding beat of the sonata. "But I don't have a home such as you would call it. And the author of my wife's _sad accident_ is here in Malacca, and so I think I'll stay a while longer. Until I'm ready, as I've said. To go somewhere else."

"To give it up to the Dutch." Which he'd also said, Sherlock didn't feel the need to point out. It was a little disappointing that Moriarty's mysterious motive could be pinned to something as mundane as revenge, but at least, he supposed, he seemed to be planning to take it on a very grand scale. "How long is this game you're playing?"

"She died four years ago. I need – another six months, I think. If you don't mind holding off on your brother's meddling. I'd be terribly put out – it's been an awful lot of planning."

"Why, not at all."

"I'm very much obliged to you."

Sherlock gave a solemn and exaggerated nod, more than pleased to have an intrigue to explore. He lifted the bow after his last, deep, throbbing note, and held it showily aloft until Moriarty's hand closed around his, their fingers mingling around the frog; and then, together, they set it carefully on the surface of the desk, and Moriarty led him by the hand and out of the study and into another of his light and luxurious rooms.

Hours later, when the lights had been extinguished and it was only by the moon filtering through the stiff linen curtains that Sherlock could see the soft, dishevelled terrain of the bed around him, they were disturbed by an urgent knock at the door. Moriarty shifted lazily, his pale back arching under the sheet that draped between them, and Sherlock let himself imagine – just for a moment – the shade of purple Mycroft's face would turn if _this_ should reach his ears. It was almost worth exposure.

But even Sherlock wasn't quite that impractical. He sat up and swung his legs out of the bed, preparing to retreat to the dressing room, to make at least a gesture at concealing himself. But then Moriarty's hand landed on his shoulder and he froze, ready to protest –

"Come in," Moriarty muttered blearily, dropping back against the headboard and rubbing sleep out of his eyes with the heel of his palm. Sherlock snatched the sheet up over his lap and had only managed to drag one leg back up under the bedding when the door swung open and a tall, broad man entered with a candle in one hand and a paper with a broken wax seal in another. He was in his shirtsleeves, his hair unkempt around his wide forehead; and judging by the expression on his face, finding another man in his master's bed was about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning. He strode directly to the side of the bed where Moriarty had propped himself up, set the candle on the bedside table, and handed him the paper. 

While Moriarty read, Sherlock stared openly. The man was between forty and fifty, although perhaps sufficiently weather beaten to look older than his age, tan and rough. His prominent Roman nose was crooked, his knuckles knotty and slightly enlarged. When he realised Sherlock was looking at him, he stared right back.

Sherlock smiled at him, the slightest pull of the corner of his mouth. The man rolled his eyes.

"This is Moran," Moriarty said as he handed back the letter with a terse nod. "My secretary. You won't need to worry about him."

"Of course," Sherlock sighed. He almost wished he hadn't been given the name – it was all too easy. But the thrill of discovery came on him nonetheless, and better still, the recognition of an opportunity. He had thought of apologizing to Watson, of course, had assumed somewhere in the back of his mind that when he boarded the ship again something would have occurred to put them back on speaking terms, because this silly tiff couldn't last very long while they were apart from one another – but this was ten times better than a stiff _sorry_ and a bottle of wine brought in from port. He looked at Moran and felt the same self-satisfied pleasure he might have found from stumbling across the perfect gift.

Moran folded the paper into his waistcoat and turned to leave.

"Wait," Sherlock said.

Moriarty turned to face him. In the dim left behind by Moran's departing candle, Sherlock saw his eyebrow arch.

"You trust him?" Sherlock asked.

Moriarty inclined his head. "He's loyal."

"Then I want him to pass a note. Get me something to write with."

Moran looked to Moriarty, who hesitated only briefly before giving him a bemused nod. Sherlock waited as he disappeared into the study, and once presented with paper and pencil scrawled a quick few lines demanding the _Galatea_ 's surgeon present himself as early as was convenient the following day to the courtyard of the governor's residence. He folded it swiftly in half, thrust it toward Moran – who naturally handed it immediately to Moriarty.

"Have it passed to the _Galatea_ tonight," Moriarty consented after reviewing it; and Moran left with the note folded in his hand, unread. "I hope you're not feeling poorly," he said once they were again alone. Even in the dark there was no hiding the curiosity in his eyes.

Sherlock lowered himself onto the mattress with a smile. "No. Do you often receive correspondence in the middle of the night? What was that?"

"Politics." Moriarty seemed content to lie with him again; he slipped back beneath the sheet and Sherlock slid toward him, pleased. "And you?"

"The same."

If Moriarty harboured any doubts – and he must have – he neglected to express them. He simply sighed, settling happily under the hand Sherlock rested at his waist, and murmured, "What fun."

***

It could only be Holmes who had summoned him ashore – no one else's demands would have met with the captain's compliance, even as reluctant as it had been – but that knowledge helped John not at all to decide what he should expect. It was far too early, first of all, to expect that he'd see Holmes any sooner than a few hours from now; the man was an incorrigible layabout even with the activity of the ship teeming around him, and in a comfortable house on land he must have slept like a stone. Still, an invitation wasn't to be rejected, even if it was before six in the morning. Any communication from Holmes was welcome after their weeks of ridiculous silence.

John blamed himself a little for that – perhaps only because by nature he found it easier to absorb blame than to heap it continually. It seemed to him sometimes that expecting Holmes to act with anything like humanity was expecting a blind man to read – but what sort of friend did that make him? What kind of man would allow his brother to act that way? Who would that benefit? And then, Holmes was the one who had crossed the line. Objectively speaking, if there was an apology owed, it was due from Holmes' side.

He could only think objectively about such things for so long, however. The fact was that in the dim, breaking morning he was rushing toward the Governor's residence all too eager to accept any sort of olive branch. He took no joy from being angry.

And the thought of Holmes at the mercy of his brother's confederates, certainly no more intelligent than he but almost definitely well-positioned to take advantage of a naïve and tactless envoy, rubbed him the wrong way. As he strode into the residence's courtyard it was with a certain anxiety that he was being called upon to second in a duel. But the space was empty; the intricate stone floor was damp with recent mist and the fountain in the center played to no one but the birds beginning to rustle in the surrounding garden, almost preternaturally green against the still diffuse glow of the sky.

John stood alone beneath a great, stooping tree, and waited. He was not alone for long.

When Sebastian first stepped out into the courtyard, John failed to recognise him. He was older, after all, by twenty years, a little more stooped and scarred and tanned and worn than he had been when they'd last stood upright, side by side, in uniform. It wasn't until Sebastian faltered, and stopped, and stared, that John knew.

He didn't hear the sea in his ears, or a rush of wind, or even of his own pulse. He just heard the fountain and the waking birds and the first stirring of the warming air in the tops of the trees. He couldn't have said how they came together, but a moment later they were there, standing inches apart under the shelter of the tree's broad, hanging leaves, John's hands curled tightly, white and numb, into the front of Sebastian's jacket – restrained, as always, careful of who might be watching, careful not to fall into anyone's arms. And Sebastian, ever less cautious, clinging to John's wrists like rigging.

"The whole time," John breathed, the silent torrent of pain in his mind taking shape into anger, "you were here? You could have taken any – anyone would have taken you home –"

"No." God, the sound of his voice was sweet – the same. He leaned in close to whisper, taking the opportunity, the cherished excuse, to brush his mouth against his ear, warm and achingly familiar. John wondered at how quickly all the sensations leapt back to him, as though he were twenty again, twenty years old and infinitely more miserable than any young, stupid man thinks possible. "No," Sebastian repeated, and there was a tremor there, slight but sad. "I couldn't."

"You could have written. Anything."

Sebastian shook his head and straightened again; the distance between them was driving John mad, but they had always known how to be careful, hadn't they? Well, not always. But they were older, now.

"I've done things," Sebastian was saying, glancing back at the sleeping house. "I'm not proud of them, and you wouldn't be either. More to the point, they'd land me on another kind of ship entirely if they got out, or worse than that. I couldn't come home." The jaunty line of his mouth, _made_ for mocking, twisted violently as he struggled to keep the all-important composure, and he rasped out the words John had come here to receive: "I'm sorry –"

And then a window opened on the house's second story, and a maid leaned out to wring a rag into the bushes below, and John and Sebastian released each other at once, standing with a foot of space between them that felt like the gulf between two continents. 

John shut his eyes.

"You'll stay," Sebastian said thickly. "At least the night – you'll stay, and I'll see you. I'll see you. But you have to be careful." 

John looked at him then, stricken with fear - not an emotion to which he was at all accustomed, but any sense of danger around Sebastian seemed like it could only end in loss. Sebastian was only looking back at the house, however, with a significant lift to his eyebrows that John knew meant he was supposed to understand something. Whatever it was, though, would have to wait. Doors were opening and curtains were being drawn and the place was coming to life, and Sebastian had to turn on his heel and take his place in it. John watched his back – it seemed straighter now, more like he remembered – as he disappeared into the house. The rising sun was slowly defining the shadow of the tree, a dark, jagged line at his feet that he somehow feared to cross.

In an unthinking haze, he staggered to one of the benches surrounding the fountain and sat, his head in his hands. If he looked peculiar to any of the servants moving back and forth around the house, none of them stopped to remark upon it, and he paid them no mind. The very sun around him felt surreal; he'd been around the globe and back again, but never, never had he felt himself so lost. How could everything have changed so quickly? He couldn't bear to look back on the bleak years that lay behind him and wonder what he might have done differently, how needlessly he'd –

No. Sebastian was here, now. The sea had spit him out somewhere and John knew he should be grateful, knew he should be overjoyed, but death had written itself so deeply on his heart it was impossible to rub out with anything as flimsy as fact. Seeing Sebastian alive was like hearing a language he'd forgotten years ago; perhaps somewhere inside of him he knew the meaning, but now he could only struggle to comprehend, the truth lying maddeningly beyond his grasp.

He was so tired. 

"Good morning, Doctor."

John lifted his head and twisted round to see Holmes standing several paces back, his hands clasped in front of him. His posture was stiffly tentative, and by the line of his mouth and the motion of his eyes it was clear that he was – nervous. Expectant. John knew at once that this was his doing, that Holmes, somehow, had accomplished this for him. That the reason the thing he wanted most in the world had just walked back into his arms was because Holmes had made it so.

There was nothing he could say. Every complaint, every perfectly legitimate grievance he had against Holmes, against anyone in the world, had disappeared like so much foam in the wind. Sebastian was Holmes' olive branch, very well – let him be an olive branch. But he was before all else _Sebastian_ , and he was his again, and there was no room in John's heart or his mind for anything else. He might be exhausted and confused and absolutely raw, but he could not be angry. Not now. He nodded, silent, not trusting himself to speak.

Holmes brows knit sharply. "I thought you'd be pleased," he said, quick, almost offended. Something like a laugh pushed out of John's throat, although it was choked and noiseless. His eyes watered.

"Jesus," he muttered, drawing his sleeve rapidly across his face. "Yes – of course." He pressed his face back down into his palm, but he could tell just from the way Holmes approached, stepping up readily to stand beside him, that he'd put him at ease. 

"Good," Holmes said, although he hardly sounded certain. "Good. Well, then." _That's settled,_ John could hear in his voice, and he could only shake his head. "I think," Holmes continued, grasping his hands behind his back, now, and turning to stare out at the fountain, "that I'll remain here. I realise you have obligations to the service, but I think you'll agree that bringing Mycroft's influence to bear will make pretty short work of all of that. I intend to tell the captain you're essential to my work here, and that if he chooses to defy me he can speak with the Ambassador upon his return. Surgeons aren't _quite_ ten-a-penny, but he can find one before he puts out again, I should think. And you'll stay here, with me." John looked up at him; his profile was mostly obscured, turned almost completely away from him, but his jaw was relaxed and there was just a hint of a curl of a smile visible. He seemed uncommonly at peace. "We may as well take advantage, don't you think? Mycroft's sent me somewhere worth being, for once. We won't let the opportunity slip."

There was nothing he wanted more than to stay here. Than to disappear into the town or into the jungle or wherever he had to go to lie once again beside Sebastian and know, as they once had so foolishly believed, that no one could see them and no one would separate them. He nodded again, lacking even the energy to ask what Holmes found so appealing about the place – right now, he didn't care a jot. He would stay. He might never leave. 

He went back to the ship once he'd had an opportunity to recover himself, ready to begin his departure from the service he'd thought had been his home but had only ever truly been a stopgap. He pushed through the streets of his new city, a city full of baking bricks and sweltering people, of trees and gardens silenced by the burning path of the sun, a sun that forced everything to attempt a futile escape from its inescapable heat.


End file.
